As for the fan:
It is much louder than the idle Sony Vaio A297XP and pretty much any other laptop I've seen. However I've read that other Asus laptops do the same after their last bios update. Apparently Asus changed their cooling 'policy'. The laptop always tries to keep the temperature below 50 degrees celsius now. You should be able to tweak this with CHC and allow it to reach 60 degrees or so (which is not that unusual for a centrino laptop I've read). This might solve the idle noise of the laptop. I myself don't mind it much anymore and I'll just leave it at this. Maybe Asus will change it again with a bios update in the future, but then at least it's Asus who did it and not me
I think only the W2Vc ships with Asus Mobile Theater, so I cannot comment on that.
As for the sound issues:
I have to confirm that there is something very wrong with the sound of this laptop. However, it is not due to the speakers, nor the soundchip. It is due to the software and I hope Asus will come with a fix for this soon. Basically only 2 of the 5 speakers of the laptop work (even though only two work it still emits pretty decent sound and I've never seen a laptop that can emit such loud sounds. I didn't dare to turn the volume up the highest yet). If you plug in external speakers (either headphones or any other type of speaker) things go wrong. I suppose it's due to the fact that the output jacks all have double (or even triple) functionality and something goes wrong there.
I did manage to attach a 5.1 surround set and it appeared to work fine to me. This is also what other users experience. Attaching anything less than a 5.1 set (for instance a stereo headset) using the laptop speakers is where it fails however.
It is much louder than the idle Sony Vaio A297XP and pretty much any other laptop I've seen. However I've read that other Asus laptops do the same after their last bios update. Apparently Asus changed their cooling 'policy'. The laptop always tries to keep the temperature below 50 degrees celsius now. You should be able to tweak this with CHC and allow it to reach 60 degrees or so (which is not that unusual for a centrino laptop I've read). This might solve the idle noise of the laptop. I myself don't mind it much anymore and I'll just leave it at this. Maybe Asus will change it again with a bios update in the future, but then at least it's Asus who did it and not me
I think only the W2Vc ships with Asus Mobile Theater, so I cannot comment on that.
As for the sound issues:
I have to confirm that there is something very wrong with the sound of this laptop. However, it is not due to the speakers, nor the soundchip. It is due to the software and I hope Asus will come with a fix for this soon. Basically only 2 of the 5 speakers of the laptop work (even though only two work it still emits pretty decent sound and I've never seen a laptop that can emit such loud sounds. I didn't dare to turn the volume up the highest yet). If you plug in external speakers (either headphones or any other type of speaker) things go wrong. I suppose it's due to the fact that the output jacks all have double (or even triple) functionality and something goes wrong there.
I did manage to attach a 5.1 surround set and it appeared to work fine to me. This is also what other users experience. Attaching anything less than a 5.1 set (for instance a stereo headset) using the laptop speakers is where it fails however.
